What made the awful TV images even worse was when the cameras would zoom in on looting on 3rd and 4th streets and in the Pike area and then would pan to a large group of Long Beach cops nearby standing idly at Broadway and Pine.

Hey, do something, I kept shrieking out loud, do something!

Who's in charge of this contingent? How can these cops continue to remain painfully inactive when businesses within ear shot were being savagely violated?

And what made this sight even more ghastly in retrospect is that less than 150 yards south from where all these policemen seemed hopelessly glued to the pavement a horrible incident was loudly unfolding.

At the corner of 1st and Pine, an iconic five-star Italian restaurant, the architecturally elegant L'Opera, was being cruelly eviscerated -- classic paintings torn to shreds, elaborate columns graffitied and hammered, beautiful mirrors with inlayed designs and pictures shattered, more than $40,000 in meats and fish for re-opening night this week stolen from the coolers, thousands of dollars of wine and liquor carted off, every glass broken, all the walls tagged, etc., etc., etc.

According to the owner, Terry Antonelli, his store had been boarded solidly up, and it took the looters several minutes as they loudly pounded their way in to his popular establishment that has been a Pine Ave. fixture since 1989.

Why weren't at least 10 or 15 of the Long Beach cops lolling around down the street sent scurrying to intervene at L'Opera?

At the time, the Long Beach chief of police, Robert Luna, was at his office headquarters implausibly informing a Channel 11 interviewer on how he had everything under control.

What?

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It reminded me of the immortal Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka Baghdad Bob, holding his hilarious press sessions for Saddam Hussein during the one-sided Iraq War informing the world how Hussein's troops were easily crushing the United States.

One scratches his noggin in bewilderment at such a laughably absurd comment by Luna, but perhaps Luna was under orders to keep his men under wraps, which certainly seemed to be the case for too lengthy a period.

Luna did belatedly call for mutual aid from other police departments and the Long Beach mayor Robert (Ol' Blood And Guts) Garcia later called in the National Guard, but, alas, this turned out to be small consolation for those many businesses that were looted with nary a policeman in sight.

I contacted three prominent local businessmen with close ties to the Long Beach police department, and all three corroborated what I myself have been hearing since the Sunday evening downtown debacle.

"I was told by a cop friend that all the cops wanted to go in and do what they should have been doing and stopped it, but that Robert Garcia wanted them to stand down because he didn't want any incident that would be on the national news," said one person, who requested anonymity.

Of course, Robert Luna under the Long Beach Charter is supposed to take his orders from the Long Beach City Manager, Tom Modica, who, after all, is the chief administrative officer, but, apparently, Mr. Modica has deferred to Garcia in police matters.

In the grand and glorious history of post-riot monologues, Mr. Garcia might have given the campest, if not most disingenuous one ever heard on Monday.

He brazenly said the Long Beach Police Department did a "fantastic" job -- tell that to Terry Antonelli, Taco Beach's Kevan Vance, King's Fish House's Sam King and so many other business owners whose shops and restaurants were trashed.

Mr. Garcia also said there were developments that were heartening -- no loss of life, no fire fighters or policemen that were seriously injured, nothing that would stain the flawless reputation of Mr. Garcia in the eyes of his political messiahs like Messrs. Gavin Newsom and Eric Garcetti.

I'm sure a lot of people were disheartened by the horrifying conduct of the Long Beach leadership during the crisis, especially people like Mr. Antonelli, whose place suffered $1 million in damages, or Mr. Vance, who has told friends he doesn't plan to re-open in a city that failed to protect him and so many other beleaguered Long Beach businessmen.